Emily Badger has a strange story about property regulations from Detroit:

The Detroit Free Press reports this week on an odd local-ordinance dispute
in the suburb of Dearborn, where several local families have taken to
using their garages for something other than parking. They've moved in
TVs and lawn chairs, laid down tile flooring and – this was apparently
the last straw – installed sliding-glass doors where the mechanized
garage entrance ought to be. These families have created a living space – something in between
outdoor patio and indoor den – out of what most people treat as a home
for their cars. [...]

But neighbors and the city aren't on board. According to the Free Press,
they're concerned that "as people get a little too comfortable hanging
out in the garage, more cars are clogging side streets." Officials also
argue that garages aren't up to code as living spaces. Now the city is
weighing whether to change a law that states that homeowners must be
able to park their cars in their garages (these families created little
ramps that allow them to drive over the sliding-glass door frames). So
do you ban patio doors? Parquet floors?

A continuing controversy in copyright law is the exemption of copyright
from First Amendment scrutiny. The Supreme Court has justified the
exemption, based on the history and the intentions of the Framers, but
this explanation is unpersuasive on the historical facts.

There is an alternative explanation: copyright is property, and private
property is generally exempt from scrutiny under standard First
Amendment doctrine. Many scholars have noted this theory, but they have
been uniformly dismissive towards it. For example, Mark Lemley and
Eugene Volokh view the property theory as so clearly wrong as to be a
“non sequitur,” because it supposedly implies that Congress can declare
anything to be property and, thereby, circumvent the First Amendment.

This Article aims to rehabilitate the property theory. Contrary to its
critics, the property theory does not say that anything labeled
“property” is exempt, but rather contains two internal limits. First,
the government-created rules of the property system must be neutral
towards speech, though the private enforcement of those rules can be
viewpoint-motivated. Second, even within the context of private
enforcement, there must still be some protection against excessive
ownership power. Understanding the property theory, including its
internal limits, then provides a powerful legal justification for the
Court’s treatment of copyright law — one that is far better than what
the Court has itself articulated.

In March we reported that owners of Madison Square Garden had petitioned New York City to
renew "in perpetuity" the permit that allows them to operate
an sports facility atop Penn Station, the country’s busiest transit hub.

Like so many epic matches at Madison Square Garden, the fight over the
future of the arena’s special permit went many rounds. In the end
though, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn delivered the crucial blow,
leaving the presumed underdogs, the preservationists and transit
advocates, the victor as two City Council committees unanimously
approved a 10-year permit for the Garden Wednesday.

The Garden, controlled by the Dolan family, had hoped to have its permit
extended a bit longer. In fact, they insisted that it should be granted
in perpetuity, arguing such was the case for other athletic facilities
in the city. But a number of civic groups fought against the effort,
arguing for a term-limited permit that might help resuscitate
negotiations over relocating the arena so that Penn Station, trapped
underneath the Garden for half a century, might be rebuilt and expanded.

If Madison Square Garden ever gets kicked off the site, a few architects have already submitted visions for what the space could become.

Conservation
biology and ecology (as well as our eyes and ears) tell us that nature
is in a constant state of flux. Yet, models of land conservation focus
on preserving the present state of land in perpetuity. Legal concepts
that center on the status quo turn a blind eye to the fact that nature
is ever-changing. This conflict is illustrated by examining both
traditional property servitudes and conservation easements. These
restrictions on private land often explicitly state that they are
preserving today’s landscape in perpetuity. This chapter explores the
inherent conflict between the changing natural world and rigid legal
structures, detailing the struggles of applying principles like
resiliency thinking and adaptive management to property tools for
conservation. It also explores why this disconnect occurs including some
discussion of environmental psychology.

Cord Jefferson looks at the aftermath of Sao Paulo's 2006 decision to ban every billboard, poster, and bus advertisment in the city:

Five years later, have all the businesses in São Paulo gone under?
Hardly. In fact, most citizens and some advertising entities report
being quite pleased with the now billboard-less city. A survey this year
found that a 70 percent of residents say the Clean City Law has been
"beneficial." "São Paulo’s a very vertical city," Vinicius Galvao, a
journalist, said in an interview with NPR. "

Where businesses are concerned, it turns out some advertisers are
actually thankful for the ban, as it's forced them to reevaluate and
improve. [...] Anna Freitag, the marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Brazil, said her
company had never considered how inefficient billboards and the like
were until they were illegal. "A billboard is media on the road," she
told the FT. "In rational purchases it means less
effectiveness... as people are involved in so many things that it makes
it difficult to execute the call to action."

This
Article explores the problems that arise when a will fails to dispose of
an individual's entire estate, so that she dies partially testate and
partially intestate. The questions then raised include (1) whether
provisions contained in the will purporting to redefine the individual's
intestate heirs should supersede the statutory designations of those
heirs, (2) whether inter vivos gifts to heirs should qualify as
advancements on the inheritances of those heirs under conditions of
partial intestacy, and, most broadly, (3) whether courts should fill in
the incomplete portions of an individual's estate plan by extrapolating
from the distributive preferences set out in the fragmentary will or by
independent reference to the statutory rules of intestacy. The intent
of testators is bound to vary on each of these points, this article
argues. In order to account for this predictable variation, lawmakers
should grant courts limited discretion to resolve each of these issues
on a case-by-case basis, taking into consideration both intrinsic and
extrinsic evidence. Such an approach would differentiate the rules of
partial intestacy from complete intestacy, which operates according to
mechanical rules. This Article suggests policy reasons for drawing that
distinction. The Article supports its analysis with empirical evidence
drawn from data sets of published cases, a resource not previously
exploited in connection with quantitative studies of inheritance law.

A number of blogs have reported that health care activist AJ Marin was recently arrested for writing the above statement on the public sidewalk in front of the home of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett. Martin was protesting the possible failure of PA to expand Medicare.

In response, Eugene Volokh investigates whether a local governments can bar people from writing messages in chalk on public
sidewalks, on the theory that this is a form of graffiti (albeit fairly
easily washable).

It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex.
If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then
you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings
frame and house our sexual lives. They tell us where and when we can,
and cannot, have sex, and with whom. To escape buildings for sex — to
use a park, a beach, or the back seat of a car — is a transgression of
one kind or another. Most of us keep sex indoors and out of sight. …

According to [sex therapist Esther] Perel, sex wastes time, needs
space, and (most intriguingly) is inhibited by too much intimacy. All
these things have implications for architecture, which in the West has
been coloured by the language of efficiency for at least a century.

The solution?

For me, the ideal would be some form of co-housing, the best-known
example being Sættedammen in Denmark, established in 1972 (with the
founding creed: ‘Children should have 100 parents’). It occupies the
right space between the wilder forms of intentional community, and
market-dominated individualism. It doesn’t explicitly challenge sexual
norms. However, by providing shared facilities (childcare, gyms,
swimming pools, saunas, rooms for parties), it provides time and space
to play, and addresses the deficits that Esther Perel identified as
inhibiting our sexual lives (sex loves to waste time, remember).

But I’d add some sort of therapeutic role, too. If we were to live
more communally, we would need help to resolve inevitable interpersonal
conflicts. The odd thing is that we already strongly value co-housing,
albeit in an occasional and time-limited form. University students live
like this, and we do the same thing on holiday; both forms seem to
provide a better emotional environment in which to explore and develop
primary relationships — including sexual ones. If we can accept such
communal living for some of our lives, why not the rest of the time?
Then we might have an architecture that actually supports, rather than
impedes, our sexual lives.

With Koontz in mind, Jessica Owley (Buffalo) has a posted a brief primer on exactions, What Exactly are Exactions?, on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

This
brief piece for the publication of the Environmental Law Section of the
New York Bar Association discusses the potential implications of Koontz
v. St. John's River Water Management District (pending before the U.S.
Supreme Court) and its implications for New York law. While all
exactions must undergo a Nollan/Dolan level of scrutiny, New York courts
have limited the reach of this analysis by narrowly defining what
constitutes an exaction. In Smith v. Town of Mendon, the New York Court
of Appeals defined exactions strangely. First, it held that conservation
restrictions did not qualify as exactions unless they required public
access. Second, bound by precedent, the court recognized that in lieu
fees are exactions requiring Nollan/Dolan analysis. These holdings seem
out of step with Supreme Court jurisprudence and likely to require
revisitation after the Court issues its opinion in Koontz. At oral
argument, the justices appeared to interpret exactions much more broadly
than the New York courts.